Re: It's also well documented that the Bush Cartel began planning the invasion of Iraq from day one. The Bush appointees consisted of just about all the founding fathers of PNAC, who had been lobbying Clinton for years to invade Iraq. The folks from PNAC felt they needed a "new Pearl Harbor" to launch their program of preemptive attacks.
Hmm... You suffer from "accordion hindsight" I'm afraid, but don't worry: it's an all too common pitfall for many pundits. Accordion hindsight merely makes you squeeze out each and every major event that unfolded since September 11, 2001 --to keep only the first and the last one.
So, let's do a quick recap: 911, Bush's UN speech about "Palestine", the anthrax scare, the Afghan war, Sharon's showdown with Arafat and his attempt to brand him as Israel's Bin Laden, and, finally, the war to topple Saddam. As you can see, the war on Iraq was not the immediate outcome of 911, on the contrary. Besides, attempts in 2002 and 2003 to link Bin Laden and Saddam have been routinely dismissed by the CIA, the White House, etc.
Re: Russia and France both had good working relationships with Iraq for oil contracts, and there was nothing but downside for either of them to see the US take control of Iraq's oil.
LOL... As I said tirelessly, oil's been a dummy variable all along, or better: a variable for dummies, leftist dummies, that is. If the US is so anxious about grabbing more oil, all it has to do is tap West Africa: billions of first-grade oil lie safely off the shores of Angola, Congo-Brazza, Guinea, Nigeria,... And, to boot, there're no Taliban in those countries and no ideological hostility towards the US.
Of course, oil has been a useful decoy to deflect public opinion's criticism away from the US's real motive: religious fanaticism --Judeo-Protestant fanaticism to support Israel at all costs. Somehow, that's a counter-intuitive point of view: Americans and Europeans (I don't use the term "Westerner" anymore) are not supposed to behave like irrational freaks, after all... I mean, Yanks are r-a-t-i-o-n-a-l people!! Driven only by mundane, down-to-earth incentives such as the bottom line, market share, oil, shareholder value, and the like... How on earth could such cool-headed, businessminded wheeler-dealers ever get the bug of bigotry?!? Bigotry and fanaticism are the trade marks of Islam, of ugly, silly Arabs, of primitive cavemen in Afghanistan.... To be sure, America is immune to such barbaric toils --LOL. Truth is, America is as fanatic as Hezbollah.
Re: The concept Russia or France had anything to do with 9/11 is absurd. They had nothing to gain, and they didn't have access to the resources to make it happen in the first place.
No, it's not absurd --it's vexing... Most Americans are so chauvinistic that the very notion that their topnotch intelligence apparatus was actually screwed by some combine of alien, unsophisticated agencies lies beyond their mental horizon... I mean, the US is splurging $40 billion annually on the CIA, FBI, NSA,... (remember Echelon?) and what happened on 911? A bunch of Russkies, Israelis and French rogues pulled a fast one on the US heartland? And all the while, Tenet, Mueller and Condi were clueless? C'mon, our intelligence bureaucracy is so great, so smart, so well-equipped... that the only way for them to get conned is for some inside conspiracy to con them.
Then again, the inside-job theory spares you the ominous prospect of a full-scale retaliation against a foreign country, that is a full-scale war.
Now, you claim that Russia had nothing to gain out of it? Actually the payoff for Russia is substantial: the Afghan squall line has been stabilized and the Muslim creep (in Central Asia) kept in check, an endeavor that couldn't be achieved by Russia anymore, unless at a heavy price and another, Grozny-like bloodshed --not to mention an open confrontation with Pakistan. |
